Lone Candle

“This is all wrong. With reasonable design parameters, a welfare state does almost nothing to discourage core potential workers from working. And there’s nothing wrong with a situation in which the elderly, teenagers, parents of very young kids, and people with severe disabilities and their caretakers don’t work. A strong welfare state has big benefits for its recipients, and it helps stabilize the macroeconomy and prevent deep recessions. Last, but by no means least, a strong welfare state creates a situation where regulatory policy questions can be evaluated on the merits with the knowledge that people will be taken care of rather than used as a backdoor to support jobs and incomes.”

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“America’s original cash welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), suffered from very real design flaws that genuinely did discourage work. The best and most natural fix would have been to spend more on the program so benefits didn’t phase out so sharply. But congressional Republicans in the mid-1990s were determined to use the flaws in the program to all but eliminate cash welfare, and after a bit of hemming and hawing, Bill Clinton went along with it and claimed it as a victory. As Dylan Matthews details, that ended up being a disaster for the poorest Americans.
But it did achieve its political objective of opening up space for two other kinds of programs. On the one hand, you have cash assistance programs that are tied to work (Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit). On the other hand, you have programs — Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8 housing vouchers — that don’t require work but also don’t give you cash. There’s also TANF, which is a federal program that gives grants to states to help them organize a cash welfare system whose benefits are only temporary (that’s what the T stands for) and conditioned on finding work within two years. The states are given huge discretion on how to run this program, often using the money for things other than delivering cash benefits.

Then America also has a separate, much more generous welfare state for senior citizens — Social Security and Medicare — and there seems to be a social consensus that the elderly are deserving of help. Stuck somewhere in between are disability programs, which are formally part of the Social Security system but politically speaking seen as “welfare” programs in part because there are always questions about the rigor of the diagnostic criteria.”

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“living in poverty — and especially growing up in poverty — has really bad impacts, and providing assistance can deliver useful long-term benefits.
A recent paper by Manasi Deshpande, for example, shows that when kids lose their SSI benefits, it has a negative long-term impact on their younger siblings’ earnings”

“This is a powerful finding because the younger sibling’s situation is not the target of the program. It’s simply showing that delivering extra financial resources to the family improves the kids’ long-term situation — better nutrition, more focus on school, whatever it is.

A study of the rollout of the SNAP program, similarly, shows that kids whose parents got benefits while they were in utero or up to age five ended up better educated, living in better neighborhoods, and less likely to be disabled as an adult than kids whose parents started getting the benefits when the kid was in their teens. The children also ended up less likely to receive social assistance programs themselves. All of these effects are modest in scale, but the impact on adult receipt of social assistance is large enough that SNAP “pays for itself” in fiscal terms separate from the benefits to the beneficiaries. SNAP benefit availability also appears to reduce obesity and reduce the number of days kids miss school due to illness.

A comprehensive study of one of America’s first cash welfare programs — mothers’ pensions — showed that women who got the benefits lived longer while their sons earned 20 percent more as adults and were less likely to be overweight (they couldn’t track daughters because of name-changing). By the same token, kids whose parents benefit from more generous EITC benefits have higher math scores and are more likely to graduate high school.”

“Medicaid expansion has saved over 20,000 lives since it was enacted. A study of a previous expansion in the 1980s showed that kids who grew up benefitting from expansion paid more in taxes and were less likely to need EITC benefits than those who did not benefit from that Medicaid expansion. A separate study shows that the grandchildren of women who benefitted from that expansion are less likely to have low birth weight. Those kids are not old enough to study adult outcomes yet, but we know that low birth weight kids are likely to have lower IQs and generally worse outcomes in terms of education and income.

Last but by no means least, kids whose families get housing assistance earn more as adults and “childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of adult incarceration for males and females from all household race/ethnicity groups.””

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“The big problem with this patchwork of programs is that it’s so much a patchwork.

Eligibility rules and procedures vary by state. If you move, you might lose benefits which creates a significant disincentive to relocate even when doing so might have other major benefits. The cash programs phase in and phase out in an odd way that delivers too little assistance to the poorest while creating very steep marginal tax rates on somewhat higher-income families.

Social Security, by contrast, is really convenient. You can earn a living in New Jersey and take it with you to Florida when you retire. And the coverage is so broad that it even takes a bite out of child poverty thanks to kids who live with older parents or older relatives and kids who receive the benefit if one of their earning parents dies or becomes disabled.”

“And to the best of my knowledge, there’s no real magic to the means-testing programs. SNAP does a lot to help people and so does housing assistance and so does Medicaid, but basically all for the same reason that cash does — the money is fairly fungible and having more money is helpful.”

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“”Using data from a nationally representative survey of older adults, we find that higher Social Security income significantly improves health outcomes among the elderly. Specifically, we find that increases in annual Social Security benefits led to significant improvements in functional limitations and cognitive function, and that the improvements in cognition function were larger for individuals with better cognition.””

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“In practical terms, there’s nothing wrong with an incremental approach. We should keep fighting to expand Medicaid in the states that haven’t done it yet. We should try to pass Joe Biden’s proposal to make Section 8 vouchers available to everyone who qualifies. We should listen to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and put more money into TANF—it’s 40 percent smaller than it was when it was enacted merely because of inflation. We should also require that states actually use a large share of the grants for cash assistance, instead of for other vaguely-related-to-welfare stuff like abstinence programs.

But in bigger picture terms we ought to do what I advocate in my book One Billion Americans and create what’s basically Social Security for Parents — a truly universal cash allowance for parents of young kids. Michael Bennett and Sherrod Brown have a plan for a child allowance worth $300/month for kids under six and $250/month for kids under 17. It’s a great plan. To be even more ambitious, I would recommend they drop the means testing (theirs phases down to zero for married couples earning over $200,000) and add a one-time baby bonus payment (you could think of it as nine months’ worth of payments during pregnancy). And conceptually, I think you should probably consider eliminating SNAP, Section 8 housing assistance, and weird stuff like LIHEAP and instead just making monthly checks even bigger. You could also scrap the family size adjustment in EITC and turn it into a narrower wage subsidy.

What you’d definitely do is take away the tax code’s backdoor subsidies for parents and instead give middle class — and even wealthy — parents access to this same allowance that everyone gets.

This would massively reduce child poverty with all kinds of ancillary benefits for child development and long-term growth.”